A decade ago, if you asked anybody in the customer service game how consumers will interact with their favourite brands in the future, the lions share would have told you that actually having to speak to someone is going be unnecessary and uncommon – if not totally extinct.
Now its becoming clear that the shift isnt going to be as seismic or sudden as once predicted.
When it comes to customer service, todays consumers are rekindling their love of voice – albeit not their own.
Automated text-based customer services, delivered through platforms such as WhatsApp, are still on the rise, but they arent dominating the conversation anymore.
People are turning to devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home Hub for quick answers to simple questions that are spoken, not typed.
Its part of the reason that the market for this technology is expanding rapidly. According to research from YouGov, the percentage of people in the UK that owned a smart speaker doubled from five per cent to 10 per cent between October 2017 and March this year.
Just last month, Google debuted Duplex, a voice controlled digital assistant that can make phone calls on behalf of users. During a live demo, the platform called a real hairdresser and booked an appointment without any supervision or human involvement. Soon, devices that use this technology will cease to be novelty and become a preferred way for customers to communicate with businesses.
If the UKs leading brands are going to stay ahead of the competition, they need to quickly learn how to engage with customers using voice command technology in a meaningful way.
To do this, they need to understand and leverage what underpins it – data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI). This family of closely related innovations is already helping brands deliver responses to simple customer service queries 24 hours a day, through automated, text-based channels. And its here where the building blocks of voice command customer service can be found.
All automated customer service platforms work using the same basic principle. They process a question, crunch the relevant data, and deliver a response. The big leap forward will come when advances in AI accelerate the range of questions they can comprehend, and make the responses they can deliver more personalised and, ultimately, more human.
Investing in these channels now will give businesses the foundation they need to take advantage when this happens.
But, of course, this means that the customer service industry is going have to re-evaluate how it resources itself. Our own research recently found that 69 per cent of all activities in a contact centre could be serviced by automation and AI in the next decade. This means that employees will work alongside AI-powered systems to handle the complex, judgement-based tasks a robot cant.
So, as businesses prepare for the rise of voice-command tech, they should also be tailoring their recruitment and training strategies to attract the right profile of people. This way, theyll have a workforce ready to take their customer service into the future.
[contf] [contfnew] 
CityAM
[contfnewc] [contfnewc]
